The Ethanol Questions I Didn't Ask

Posted by Robert Rapier on December 7, 2009 - 11:01am

I have been asked to submit a video question on ethanol policy that will be potentially answered in a video blog by someone who is very well-known in the energy business. I will keep the details quiet for now, including the question I did submit.

I really had to brainstorm on exactly which question I would ask. I made a short list, and finally honed it down to one that I think is fair, but tough. But I had a number that I decided not to ask, either because I already knew how it would be answered (even if I disgreed with the expected answer) or the questions/answer to the question was so complex that it couldn't be answered in a short video clip.

Here I discuss what I didn't ask, but it really gets to the heart of the issues I have with U.S. ethanol policy. First, a bit of framework. I believe that I am, and have always been objective, and a realist. I don't believe that we are ever going to have a moment where government leaders say "Let's abandon this ethanol pathway." We had an example of that with MTBE, but there was clear evidence that MTBE was getting into groundwater and lingering.

The issues around ethanol are more complex. Corn ethanol has been U.S. policy for the past 30 years, and it will be policy for the next 30 years. It is too embedded in agriculture policy, and I think it would be devastating for Midwestern economies if we changed direction on corn ethanol. Thus, I think we continue down that path, for better or worse.

My concerns are, and have always been: What are the long-term consequences? I don't limit this to ethanol; this is a question that I ask of all energy options. Dependence on oil has some significant long-term consequences. The most serious of which, for me, is the potential for building a world that is only sustainable as long as oil production continues to expand. I see significant risk there, so it has always been my position that we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels in general.

With respect to ethanol, consider this thought experiment that I posed following one of my previous essays: Would you consume 2 BTUs of natural gas to produce 1 BTU of ethanol? I think most people would conclude that this would be foolish; that your natural gas supplies would stretch much further if instead you simply use the natural gas in CNG vehicles (acknowledging of course that there are lots of things you have to evaluate in that scenario). For those who would answer "Yes" to that question, I would argue that your view of ethanol is entirely one-dimensional. You probably only care that it is homegrown, and you don't worry much about the long-term consequences. (The person I asked responded to the question "Of course. The goal is to get off imported oil.")

Of course the truth is more complicated than the example above. It doesn't take 2 BTUs of natural gas to produce 1 BTU of ethanol. Estimates vary, but it is still safe to say that most ethanol operations in the U.S. continue to have substantial fossil fuel inputs. That is the way they were built, and that is the way they will continue to operate. Over the long-term, there is potential to change that equation by using biomass boilers, but those are more expensive to operate than a standard natural gas boiler.

So on average the ethanol industry does still have a heavy fossil fuel dependence, albeit largely domestic coal (for electricity) and domestic natural gas - with some petroleum inputs for trucks, tractors, etc. (One thing to note is that more than 50% of our fertilizer supplies - derived from natural gas - are in fact imported). So what if the question was "Would you spend 1 BTU of natural gas to make 2 BTUs of ethanol?" If you are doing a holistic analysis, the answer should be "It depends. What are the other impacts?"

There are those who wrap U.S. ethanol policy in patriotism and the American flag, and who would rather not get into those questions. These questions are hand-waved away with clichés like "I would rather support American farmers than Saudi sheiks." I try to look at it from the perspective of an engineer, a scientist, and an environmentalist. I want to stack the columns up and figure out what is really happening as a result of our ethanol policy and subsequent rapid expansion of corn production. I want to look at it from the perspective of "What is going to be the impact on the world my children will inherit?"

Just a few of the key questions for me are the following:

Are we depleting fossil aquifers as a result of the expansion of corn in areas requiring irrigation - putting future food supplies at risk?

Are we at risk of contaminating water supplies with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer run-off?

What has been the measurable impact on our oil imports - the generally stated reason for our ethanol policy?

What is the long-term impact on soil as a result of erosion and pesticide usage?

What is the risk of major weather events impacting the corn crop, and subsequently causing a shortage of corn for ethanol and driving food prices much higher?

What are the other risks of closely linking together food supplies with fuel supplies?

In a nutshell, I want to know if we are compromising the future relative to other options, and/or relative to the status quo. These sorts of issues are generally ignored by most advocates. They believe our ethanol policy is the right thing to do, and then nothing else matters. I have debated people like this before, and they are simply not interested in the holistic picture. Often, it is because they are vested interests.

Chief ethanol lobbyist Bob Dineen isn't going to be at the forefront, trying to determine the answers to these questions. His job is to promote ethanol, period. He will get involved when one of these questions becomes persistent enough and loud enough, and his position will typically be that of defense attorney: Deflect the question if you can, and try to raise doubts that the question even matters.

But I am not a vested interest dug into a bunker. If our ethanol policy is better than the status quo, then I am all for it. But you can't know that unless you take a really comprehensive look. I would like to see an independent analysis of all of these issues, now that we are some 11 billion gallons per year into this experiment.

The problem is finding an independent agency to do such an analysis. The ethanol lobby hires their consultants, who conclude, "It's all good." Big surprise there. (By the way that is the same guy who wrote a paper stating that ethanol with the energy value of 64 million barrels of oil displaced 206 million barrels of oil).

Energy policy in general is a complicated issue, and it is wrapped up deeply in politics. I doubt we will ever get the independent review I would like to see - and even if we did the lobbyists would immediately go to work trying to discredit the study. But I hope you can see why I decided not to get into that with the question I submitted. It might take 10 minutes to ask it, and then an hour to answer it - and I don't think the answer would really get into the fine details that I am interested in.

Biodiesel does not have the hygroscopic properties which make ethanol hard to handle in bulk, and make it corrosive.

Diesel engines are inherently more efficient in real life because their efficiency is retained under partial load. A spark-ignition (gasoline or ethanol) engine can be made almost as efficient as a compression-ignition (diesel) engine when both are operating under full load, but spark-ignition efficiency drops dramatically under partial loads because the effective compression ratio is reduced.

There are general public welfare questions that are rarely asked about ethanol production and subsidization. Given that ethanol, its capital development, the production of its major feedstock, and other ancillary aspects of the industry are heavily and aggressively subsidized, the major question to be asked is this: is society better off as a consequence?

The "better off" assumes that our collective welfare has been enhanced and there are amounts of tangible and generally agreed intangible improvements in our well-being that make spending a dollar of public money on ethanol promotion and production equal to or better than spending it on some other manner of energy production, conservation, or even on a non-energy matter.

This would require a complete, national-level benefit - cost analysis whose objective would be to answered a much bigger question, i.e.: What are the most efficient and effective manners in which to reduce our consumption of hydrocarbons in total, enhance productivity from existing energy uses, and with regard to domestic energy security, reduce our dependence on foreign-sourced fuels?

Arguments about energy in and energy out are important, indeed essential as the science must battle advocate-driven misinformation (like your outrageous oil displacement aside), but I believe we have totally missed the bigger and more important questions as we get side-tracked in defending positions either for or against biofuels rather than determining in fact and with confidence whether and by how much society gains from the current bundle of biofuels policies.

I am most assuredly not an ethanol fan-I am convinced that moonshine was made for drinkin' and that down the corn ethanol road lies an ecological disaster in the maling because as Robert points out we are now politically hooked on it. This addiction is like cocaince addiction, in that the more you get, the more you insist on, regardless of the consequences.

As fuel supplies get thighter and tighter we will by neccesity run our car motors at maximum efficiency by downsizing them and adding to the gear ratios available.When I started driving two speeds were common.Three speeds were the standard until the early nineties when most automatics became fourspeeds.(some gearheads insist this is three plus overdrive)

Five speed sticks are now the rule and the more expensive automatics are six speeds.

Incidentally most cars can be fitted with slightly larger diameter tires with no ill effects on handling which effectively lowers engine speeds a bit and generally improves actual fuel economy a bit, but not always.Odometers and speedometers will indicate slightly lower distances traveled and speeds traveled than true readings if the taller tires are fitted.

If continiusly variable transmissions work out... infinite speeds are available for practical purposes.And if hybrids become the rule,then engines can be downsized even further.

If things don't go downhill too fast one of these days we will be driving hundred mpg cars.The technology is already available and dirt cheap.Part of it is a built in speed limiter that will prevent a car from going over say forty five mph.The other part is downsizing and streamlining.

With trucks confined one lane on freeways, and limited to the same lower speeds,bumper cars will be safe enough.The very large majority of multivehicle crashes are afterall between cars rather than cars and trucks.

One aspect of ethanol that is not often talked about and even less utilized is its high octane properties. If we were to raise the compression ratio of engines burning ethanol, their specific power output would rise, as would their efficiency. Unfortunately this creates problems if you wish to burn straight gasoline or low ethanol blends in the same engine. An ethanol-only (or E85, even ) engine could have a compression ratio of 13:1, raising its power per cc and allowing a smaller, more efficient engine to produce the same power as a larger one. Add turbocharging (a natural for a high octane application) and engines could get even smaller and more efficient.

I understand a number of auto manufacturers are doing work on this concept. Its a pity today's flex fuel vehicles are so lame at handling this fuel.

European car engines tend to run higher compression ratios (10.5:1 or higher) because of the higer quality of Gas avalible 95 Octane standard or 98 Super. This allows the engines to be smaller and more efficient
This also is whe the standard engines here tend to be smaller and so less internal friction . Ford Focus here 1.4 or 1.6 or 2.0 in states.
VW TSI top spec
Volkswagen Golf GT TSI 3-door. Engine 1390cc, four cylinders. Power 168bhp @ 6000rpm. Torque 177 lb ft @ 1750rpm, turbo charger and supercharging on same engine

One aspect of ethanol that is not often talked about and even less utilized is its high octane properties.

It may not be often talked about, but oil companies are highly aware of its significance. That's really the only reason they are promoting it. All of their other octane enhancers (e.g. tetraethyl lead, MTBE), have been banned or are at risk of being banned because of environmental problems. But good old corn alcohol, what could be wrong with that? If you can't burn it, you can drink it (hic!)

There's another way to take advantage of ethanol's higher octane and it includes all the legacy vehicles already on the road. Everbody go back and look at the North Dakota ethanol gas mileage study. The two Chevy Impalas in the study are the same except one is flex fuel and one is not. Flex fuel vehicles have a fuel compensation sensor or a flex fuel sensor. This adjusts ignition timing. At E10 and E20, the timing is increased toward optimum for the engine. At around 91-93 octane (E20-E30) anymore ignition advance is beyond optimum regardless of octane rating available although I have seen some 98-100 octane tunes that extract the last couple percent of horespower not gas mileage. The non flex fuel Impala followed the expected drop in gas mileage due to the reduction in Btu content. The flex fuel Impalas' gas mileage improved for E10 and E20 because the improvement in efficiency due to the timing advance more than offset the reduction in Btu content of those fuels. Beyond E20 gas mileage began dropping because no more timing advance could be added although it was higher than the non flex fuel impala.

All this is similar to my experience with my vehicle. It's a 2000 vintage with 112,000 miles. I sent my engine computer out to be reprogrammed for higher octane for around $100. With no other changes, running E10 before and after from the same gas pump, my mileage increased about 10%. Nearly every spark ignition engine on the road today could have it's engine tuned for higher octane. IF (big IF) we could have E10 available everywhere their fuel mileage would increase. An even bigger IF would be the government buying into such a program but it could be done.

Any engine with a knock sensor can automatically tune for higher-octane fuel. What it can't do is compensate for the effect of spark advance on NOx production and emissions. The best thing we could do with ethanol is to use it as an on-demand octane booster for downsized, highly-turbocharged engines; methanol would be even better.

Yeah, all engines now have knock sensors and will retard the ignition to compensate for low-octane fuel. They're also designed to be extremely resistant to preignition damage and will run on anything better than salad dressing. The only people who use high octane fuel nowadays are those who like to use high denomination bills to light Cuban cigars, and those who didn't get the memo about knock sensors.

Oh, and the dudes who drive Turbo Porsches, which lose a lot of power if they have to drop the boost on the turbos. They're also the same guys who light Cuban cigars with high-denomination bills.

Knock sensors do not tune for higher octane. They retard spark when they sense knock. With regard to the debunking, I repeat, the flex fuel vehicle has the ability to advance timning over the non flex fuel vehicle and that's why it makes more fuel mileage over the non flex fuel vehicle up to E20. Also compare the horsepower ratings of the non flex fuel vehicle compared to the flex fuel vehicle. The flex fuel is higher due to the ability to advance ignition timing.

The non-flex fuel vehicle can just as easily have the ability to advance spark for premium fuel, which it will do by advancing spark and not finding any knock. What it won't have is the fuel-composition sensor to estimate the proper fuel/air mixture before the oxygen sensor is hot.

If the non flex fuel vehicle is tuned for 87 octane it will have a spark lookup table with numbers that only support 87 octane. It can't advance the timing beyond that to take advantage of higher octane. The flex fuel vehicle has higher numbers and has that ability. But your correct about the non flex fuel vehicle can have the ability to do this. You have to have the computer reprogrammed for the higher octane, which is what I did.

After reading many of Robert Rapier's and Engineer-Poet's excellent posts, I am finally compelled to jump and comment on this one. The best thing we can do with ethanol is to not to mix it with gasoline fuel at all - this is just about the worst thing we can do. By mixing the ethanol with gasoline, even in e85, we lower the octane rating of the fuel so much that the maximum compression is limited to about 12.5:1. However ethanol alone can handle compression of up to 16:1, and natural gas and diesels can take 23:1.

What a "flex fuel" vehicle should be is one that runs on both ethanol and natural gas. So if we make a new engine with 16:1 compression, we can run any proportion of NG and/or ethanol, at any time. This engine will achieve efficiency approaching a diesel This is very important because it would then mean we are not limited to a 1:1 energy replacement of gasoline, as is normally they case. We can now extract about 10-20% more energy from this fuel. NG avoids the cold start problems of ethanol-only engines (though so do old fashioned glow plugs). NG is perfect for city driving, where the 150 mile range on a normal tank is not an issue, and combined with a full tank of ethanol, you can have 400+ mile total range. These engines can also be run on the lean side of the stoichiometric ratio, to maximise efficiency (industrial NG engines do this, and get up to 40% thermal efficiency with low NOx emissions) . The exhaust emissions from such an engine would be cleaner in every respect than even E85 engines today.

But it gets better still. because we are NOT blending ethanol with gasoline, we do not need to make it 0% water content. Distillatiion only gets ethanol to 96%, and getting the last 4% out with the molecular sieve method, uses almost as much energy as the rest of the distillation process. Not only that, but the 4% water actually makes the engine run cleaner, cooler and more efficiently (water and alcohol injection is a well known power and octane booster for performance and military vehicles) . So now we are able to make a meaningful reduction (about 20%) in the energy used to make the ethanol (lowering the Energy investment) and we can get more out of it (by about 10%) for a an improvement in the EROEI of about 35%.

Now, if we want to get really creative, we can steal some technology from the fuel cell folks, and do on board steam reforming of the ethanol to hydrogen, which then goes into the engine. Ethanol can be steam reformed into CO2 and H2 at about 600C, which just happens to be lower than the engine exhaust temperature (typically 800C). The reaction goes CH2CH3OH +3H2O +heat to 2CO2 + 6H2. This reaction is endothermic (this the heat requirement) and the resulting H2 has 20% more energy than the ethanol we started with. This is essentially the same process used in petroleum refining, only they reform natural gas instead, which needs 900C heat) In effect, we are recycling the exhaust heat back by turning it into chemical energy. Where does the water come from? Well, the ethanol mix, of course. For a stoichiometric reforming reaction, you need ethanol that is 54% water by weight. So that would mean we only need to distill the ethanol to 90proof, saving more energy, and then we can reform it to get 120% energy. This is evidenced by the performance car community (and WWII aircraft) who have all found that a 50/50mix of methanol and water gives maximum power increase. Ethanol is not quite as good as methanol, but the results are similar.

So now our EROEI for ethanol is starting to look really good. We have cut the distillation energy by about 65%, increased the compression to get 10%, and upped the energy content of the fuel by 20%. I won't jump into the debate about which numbers to use for EROEI, but with these swings, whatever you use, the EROEI has probably doubled. In fact, at this point, the MPG on pure ethanol (excluding the 54% water content) would easily exceed the mpg on gasoline. And since we are now burning a mix of NG and hydrogen ("Hythane"), the exhaust would be very clean indeed, we may even be able to eliminate some of the pollution control gear.

Ethanol and methanol are the only fuels where on board steam reforming is practical, because of the low reaction temperatures (you can reform gasoline or diesel, or coal but you also need 900C heat). Of course, the reforming only works when the engine is well warmed up, that's why you have the NG for city driving. And you can "plug in" you natural gas car to your home gas supply, with the special compressor station. The dual fuel; aspect also creates "competition" between the fuel sources and insulates the customer against spikes or shortages in either.

And there's one more thing the ethanol industry could do to further improve the EROEI, regardless of the above suggestions. That would be to stop burning fuel for their distillation. It is one of the few industrial processes that needs large amounts of low grade heat, and where is the best place to find lots of low grade reject heat? That would be a coal fired power station! In fact, the condensing steam is the perfect "soft " heat for distillation. a 500MW coal fired plant rejects about 1000 MW of heat, and even if we only use half that for the distillation, we could distill 1.1 million gallons per day, for "free". That is a LOT of ethanol, not only improving the EROEI, but also the $ROI, and significantly reducing CO2 emissions for its production . And, by happy convenience, it just so happens that the best place to find coal fired power plants is in the midwest, smack in the middle of corn country. In fact, ten such coal fired power plants (and there are many more of them) could supply all the heat used for the current US ethanol production of 10bn gal/yr. Assuming that natural gas is currently used, this would save $400m of natural gas and two million tons of CO2!

So there is a basket of changes, that can be made with existing (American) technology, to make ethanol cheaper and cleaner to make, to create a fleet of vehicles that consume at least 50% less energy than they do today, do so with less emissions, and make America the leader in vehicle clean tech. If, and it's a big if, cellulosic ethanol ever gets going, the we will truly be ready to make the best possible use of it. I think even compared to producing biodiesel(which has good EROEI but low yield/acre) that this ethanol economy would compare favourably.

Last of all, such a vehicle would end, completely, the debate about whether ethanol is actually displacing oil, as you simply can't run one of these vehicles on gasoline or oil products - it is every bit as "oil independent"as an electric vehicle. It would be interesting to do a careful "round trip" look at the energy efficiency of such a vehicle compared to electric cars - even with 60% efficient NG combined cycle electricity, this ethanol car, and ethanol production process would come close to matching it, and be far cheaper to make.

Best of all, by definition, such a car can NOT run in imported oil, it is a true American fuelled vehicle.

To adopt this path would truly be major step down the road of energy independence. To continue to burn mix ethanol with gasoline not only means we continue to depend on it, but it is holding back, in a big way, the potential energy efficiency of ethanol.

I will read this in more detail later, but on the surface this looks like a good idea to me. I agree with your comments on mixing ethanol and gasoline. It gives you the worst of both worlds. You lose fuel efficiency, and you can't boost compression ratio because of the gasoline.

The alcohol-reforming system isn't new to me (I think I recall reading about something similar in the 70's, perhaps in SciAm before they dumbed it down to what used to be high-school science), but it sounds complex. It's also a system which requires specialty fuels not available everywhere (Hythane isn't common even if CNG is readily available).

There's also the issue of poor EROI. If ethanol is a real 1.6:1 after the improvements, volume-parity with gasoline (another 1.5:1) still leaves the result at 2.4:1; this is about half the 5:1 which is around the minimum we need. Volume quantity is another issue, because we can't rely on corn or any kind of grain to make 100+ billion gallons/year (anhydrous equivalent). We'd have to come up with some way to produce it from cellulosic feedstocks, and the technologies are iffy.

The fastest route to saving petroleum with ethanol is the downsized, ultra-supercharged engine using direct injection of ethanol for charge cooling and octane boosting (gasoline is fed by port injection). The reduced friction and pumping losses from the downsized engine can save 30% of the total fuel with less than 5% ethanol required (perhaps similar volume for 100 proof as for 190); this also eliminates the high-pressure tankage. Ford is getting there with Ecoboost, but this is a long way from where we need to go and we don't have the luxury of time.

It has not been possible to make a CVT (Continuously Variable Transmission) very efficient yet.
Conventional manual transmissions are very efficient [more than 98% efficiency].
In Germany most people use conventional manual transmissions.
Something comfortable (to drive) and efficient are dual-clutch (dry clutch) type transmissions.
They are like automated manual transmissions.
And there are 6 and 7-speed models already in the market.
In the coming years, maybe more people in Germany will switch to dual-clutch type transmissions.

Most CVTs are combined with a power sapping torque converter which reduces low speed efficiency. The Prius is one exception where the torque split transmission sends power to the generator when the car is stopped and idling. I haven't tried a dual clutch transmission, but they're supposed to perform well. Reliability is still an unknown with any new technology. I haven't heard of high failure rates on the CVTs or dual clutch, but the repair costs out of warranty are much higher if they do have a problem.

I'd still go with a manual, but one big problem these days is that many manuals have close ratios with higher rpm in top gear compared to the automatic on the same car. This is even on economy cars like a Honda Civic or Fit (Jazz in the rest of the world).

NISSAN's MICRA,Primera,Qaskai are all avalible with CVT auto box only it uses a electro magnetic clutch and Van Dorne Belt, History Goes back to DAF(Volvo) 66 with Rubber belt. Ford/Fiat sorted most of the issues with in 90's (metal Belt)in Escort then droped it and Nissan took it up prefected it. From experience it is not much more fuel efficient especialy on open road.

"one big problem these days is that many manuals have close ratios with higher rpm in top gear"

Small gasoline cars with manual transmissions should come with 6-speed transmissions.
And it would be clever if the 6th gear has a ratio that converts every 1000 RPM of engine speed
to 25 ~ 28 MPH of vehicle speed.

My sub-2 liter diesel car has a 5th gear which converts ~1900 RPM to 60 MPH. I wish it had a 6th gear which did about 25% better, because it has way more torque than it needs and could improve mileage quite a bit at a lower engine speed.

indeed this does all of these things. i've seen prototypes in operation. like a lot of individual inventors these days, the
guy who invented these couldn't afford to pay maintenance on the patents, so this is in the public domain now.
The way you get uniform motion out of it is by using more than one module- the prototypes i've seen used two and four modules - since obviously with one module you can't get more than 180 degrees of the rotation through. with two you can, but with four it puts less strain on the parts.

Part of it is a built in speed limiter that will prevent a car from going over say forty five mph.

The Loremo will get 150 MPG without any such limit; the Beetle TDI already gets close to 100 MPG with a few tweaks. Even the Volt will beat 100 MPG average if its electric mileage fraction exceeds about 50%.

Actually, it's because throttling forces the engine to pump air from a vacuum in the intake manifold to atmospheric at the tailpipe; all of this pumping work is lost. Unthrottled engines (controlling air charge with late intake-valve closure) radically reduce pumping losses and the part-throttle efficiency penalty is much smaller.

My guess on the reason for gasoline rather than biodiesel is that gasoline would have more appeal to voters (if it kept prices down) and to corn farmers (who are also voters). Also, the ethanol could be seen as reducing the need for corn price subsidies. Since farm states have a disproportionate share of the votes in the senate, and since Iowa has historically been a very early primary state, these were additional plusses.

You are so right. I believe less than 10% of corn nowadays goes for human food directly, usually as corn sweeteners. Over half goes to animal feed, and I believe the second biggest use is for fuel.

What is "interesting" to contemplate is whether production can actually keep going up. Based on some pretty fundamental issues having to do with RUBISCO and oxygen interactions, nighttime respiration and pollen tube fragility, I have some doubts.

See this slide from my ASPO talks, for some insights into my line of thinking.

Is anyone really , really looking very closely at the effects on our land and soil. And thereby the side effects on wildlife,water, air and pollution? I mean other than just an easy 'aside'?

What is the EROEI on THAT? How can you measure the die off of a species? Say honey bees? Pollinators? Etc.

IMO NO ONE ever looks closely and measures it. They want to walk around blindfolded and in pretend mode.

When the last tree falls, when the last insect dies, when the last bit of pure water is gone, will be far far too late.

Already events are happening? Has anyone a notion of what happened to Totonellia and his bats? What about the lack of grasshoppers here in my area? Yes the lowly grasshopper. Perhaps the canary in the mine??

Yes NO one is looking, they are just saying "Full speed ahead on biodiesel or ethanol or whatever else allows them the 'thousand mile long Caesar Salad bar'. As JHK puts it so well.

The city and suburb folks don't see it. Only those who live on the land in the outback and are not busy in the hive of those endeavors. Like the farmers.

There is a deadly feedback loop here that tends to be overrunning the engine. The farmer supplies and the rest buy and oblige and nature and our planet suffer.

Does no one speak for Gaia? No one?

I followed a link on yesterday's DB to the magazine Nature.
Seems its online and free. For all this time I have not been privy to it. Now I will read it each and every day.

Time for discussion on all this should have already been about the destruction inherent in it. There is little IMO or of what I see. Why is that one wonders.

Planet killers, just to feed our ego,greed and lust.
Bad science is killing us. Thought and mind control as well. Where are the Men of Wisdom?

Airdale-kudos to CRU and screw the cracker ass hackers!
When I have no more gas for my tiller I will get my hoe and shovel out and still wrest food from the ground, if its not totally destroyed.

Is anyone really , really looking very closely at the effects on our land and soil. And thereby the side effects on wildlife,water, air and pollution? I mean other than just an easy 'aside'?

That gets really to the heart of the question I would an answer to, but that couldn't be answered in a short video clip. I would like to see an independent LCA done by highly qualified people who aren't influenced by the politics. Personally, I don't think the answer would be one that ethanol advocates would like to hear.

Your post cuts to the heart of the matter, airdale, but it isn't centred on ethanol production, though that type of strategy is just making matters worse. Your questions are valid for just about all human activities and almost all food production.

So many of the comments (and a large number of the articles) have an implicit assumption that the societies we live in can pretty much go along as normal, if we just tweak this or that. There is rarely an assumption that a fundamental shift in how we run our societies will be needed.

Unsustainable societies can't be made sustainable by altering their mode of transport, or growing food in a different way, or internalising the environmental impacts in the price of goods and services.

When you see that sustainability means operating only on the annual resource budget offered by nature, then you start to get a glimpse of how differently we need to live.

"When you see that sustainability means operating only on the annual resource budget offered by nature, then you start to get a glimpse of how differently we need to live."

Yes indeed, but are any of us living anywhere close to this. Could we even calculate it? www.myfootprint.org and other such measures are useful rough approximations of where we are and where we need to be going, but I get the sense that they are rather generous. Merkel's "Radical Simplicity" is a bit closer, perhaps.

Biodiesel and ethanol are both net energy positive.
The coproducts, soymeal and DDGS are too valuable to be neglected so these cannot be regarded as pure energy crops.

Soybean with soymeal requires more farm inputs .49 BTU input per BTU fuel out than corn at .29 BTU input per BTU out.

The difference between biodiesel and ethanol with coproducts is .86 BTU input per BTU fuel output for soybeans and .96 BTU input per BTU output for corn, a 10% difference which is not significant, therefore the much greater productivity of corn ethanol makes it the clear choice.

re: The productivity of US biodiesel crops is too low to compete with corn ethanol.

Ahem. Majorian, did you actually read that article you linked to at the end of your message?

What it said was:

Ethanol yields 25% more energy than the energy invested in its production, whereas biodiesel yields 93% more. Compared with ethanol, biodiesel releases just 1.0%, 8.3%, and 13% of the agricultural nitrogen, phosphorus, and pesticide pollutants, respectively, per net energy gain....

Which to my way of thinking is trying to say that biodiesel is much more energy efficient and less polluting than corn ethanol.

However, the real kicker in the article is:

Even dedicating all U.S. corn and soybean production to biofuels would meet only 12% of gasoline demand and 6% of diesel demand.

Which to my way of thinking means that corn ethanol is only useful as an octane enhancer for gasoline, and biodiesel is mainly useful for farmers to run their tractors on so they can produce corn. You can't run to whole US economy on biofuels without everybody starving to death.

It's reality check time, folks. Biofuels are not the ultimate solution to an oil shortage. You have to think further outside the box because the solution is not inside it.

The promoters of ethanol are gung ho and are not interested in any rational look at the big picture.

There will always be plenty of numerically challenged people out there who will support ethanol, and more ethanol , and MORE ethanol ,uncritically, because the people who make the money out of it drown out the voices of people like you and me.

Biofuels would not be a bad partial solution to our energy problems if the world were populated with TOD readers and public policies were to be centered on conservation and efficiency and a fast build out of renewables.

But what is much more likely, almost inevitable omo, is that the driving public will but the hype and we will run ourselves further into the ground financially ,politically, and ecologically trying to save the personal car and the rest of the DREAM.

Every nickel going into subsidizing ethanol needs to be going into conservation, efficiency and renewables.

I like biodiesel's advantages over ethanol but can only afford old gasoline powered cars. Most of these old cars do have port injection systems and I wonder if any experiments have been done using biodiesel in a spark ignition engine?

Who is claiming that the entire economy be run on biofuels? There is no single fuel running our economy now. There is a mix of coal, oil, nat gas, nukes, hydro, with wind coming on strong along with a little solar. People tend to forget that wood is a biofuel and it fueled many early steam engines. When asked about the best way to power a car using biofuels
I always say burn it as a replacement for coal in power plants and use the electricity to charge EV batteries.

OTOH biodiesel stands as a logical fuel for the agriculture sector since as claimed above bean oil yield is 100 gal/ac/year and average farm energy use is only 10 gal/ac/year. That leaves plenty left over for distribution and processing. Soybeans can be a natural source of fixed nitrogen when used in rotation with corn thereby lowering demand for nat gas based ammonia.

You're not going to use biodiesel in a gas engine; the flash point is way too high to get a combustible mixture in a cold engine. Once warm you have the problem of very low octane (high cetane). Think about producer gas instead.

Beyond that gasoline engines are not built sturdily enough to last if converted to diesels.None of the critical parts will take the pounding.To the best of my knowledge there has never been a successful conversion of an engine originally designed for strictly automotive use.

The diesel conversion that GM tried using thier 350 v8 earned them the undying eninimity of every body who bought one.Nearly all of them suffered catastrophic failures in well under 75 thousand miles , whereas the gasoline version of the same engine is known to last up to and beyond four hundred thousand miles used in light delivery trucks if meticulously maintained.

It is possible to convert some very heavy duty truck and equipment engines in theory but in practice it is far and away cheaper to just buy a diesel to start with.

The things that first class machinists and mechanics do for the fun of it or for the wealthy owners of one of a kind custom made cars cost a lot of money.
Way more money than any car is worth to an ordinary joe who intends to use it to get to work.

If you can find an older VW or Mercedes diesel they will run great on B100 and can run well on SVO. Conversions aren't very expensive. My brother-in-law had a Rabbit diesel that he put 350K miles on. He gave it to a guy who cleaned it up and runs it on SVO (straight veg oil) that he gets used, free from restaurants and filters/washes. If you need a truck, Mitsubisi made a diesel pickup that converts well to SVO (around '86-'89). They also made an early version of the Montero/Dodge Raider that is rare, but a great little diesel SUV. I had an '87 that I wish I still had today. It got great mileage.

Which to my way of thinking is trying to say that biodiesel is much more energy efficient and less polluting than corn ethanol.

Seems you didn't read the article correctly.

What is the more efficient use of land, a crop that gets 233 gallons equivalent of biodiesel per acre or one that gets 100?

As far as energy to produce 1 BTU of fuel output in the coproduct scenario for corn(.2 BTU of coproduct) takes .94 BTU of input. In the soybeans you produce 1 BTU of fuel output plus .11 BTU of glycerol and .56 BTU of soymeal for .86 BTU of inputs. Fig 1.

So in terms of energy to make fuel in the coproduct scenario not counting the coproducts corn has an EROI of 1.06 (or 1/.94) and soybeans has an EROI of 1.16( or 1/.86).

Do you think these two EROIs are so different?

The .93 you quote is the efficiency if all coproducts are counted as fuel (1.67/.86)which I am sure even you will agree is idiotic.

As far as fertilizer and pesticides go, I pointed out that soybeans use .09 Btu per 1 Btu fuel output versus .12 Btu per 1 Btu fuel output(Fig 1.). I was surprised that soybeans used 2/3 as much fertilizer as corn.
How much less polluting is that?

It's reality check time, folks. Biofuels are not the ultimate solution to an oil shortage. You have to think further outside the box because the solution is not inside it.

What ultimate solution did you have in mind, RMG?

More oil maybe?

What would be the result if the US put 80 million acres into corn for ethanol. At an average of 140 bushels per acre it would yield 29 billion gallons of ethanol and 3.8 billion bushels of DDGS. Today at 80 million acres we get 5.6 billion bushels of animal feed(a 1/3 drop in animal feed--would we starve? No).
36.4 billion gallons of ethanol with 130 billion gallons of gasoline covers a 28% reduction of gasoline demand. The 2007 Biofuels Security Act projects 60 billions of ethanol capacity by 2030.http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/9709/1/sp07ug01.pdf

Double the efficiency of the car fleet by 2030 and you're almost there.

They mean that a huge amount of energy goes into creating the incredible yields that corn gets per acre, whereas soybeans (although they don't produce as high yields) don't require nearly as much in terms of energy inputs. Corn requires huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, which is extremely energy intensive to produce, whereas soybeans produce their own nitrogen and don't need nearly as much fertilizer.

And there are a lot of energy inputs required to turn corn into ethanol, biodiesel is a lot less energy intensive. In fact, farmers can buy kits to run their diesel tractors on straight soybean oil. All it takes is a little preheating and diesel engines will run on straight vegetable oil.

However, the real constraint is that the US does not have enough farmland to grow enough biofuels to sustain its economy. The volumes are just way too big.

What ultimate solution did you have in mind, RMG?

Well, my own personal solution when I actually worked for a living (before I retired to my chalet high in the Rocky Mountains, far above mere mortal problems) was to ride a wind-powered electric train to work. When that got boring, I walked or rode my bicycle. These are perfectly feasible transportation modes, but some people seem to think they are too far outside the box. "We can't all do that!" they say. No? Why not?

Majorian, Majorian, Majorian. You need to understand what they are really talking about. Gallons per acre is not the standard - it is energy input versus energy output.

As I pointed out before, the 93% increase for soybean coproducts and fuel versus the 25% increase for corn coproducts and fuel is nonsense.
Who in their right mind cares about the BTU value of DDGS or glycerol or soybean meal?

A 42 gal barrel of crude oil produces on average 19.5 gal of gasoline(~42% of the barrel)
When a barrel of oil goes to the refinery 15% is burnt there so on a Btu basis you get an EROI of 6.6 but what is the 'gasoline BTU returned on energy invested'? 15% of a barrel is 850,000 BTUs and 19.5 gallons out is 2223000 BTUs so the G-ROI is actually 2.6.

However, the real constraint is that the US does not have enough farmland to grow enough biofuels to sustain its economy. The volumes are just way too big.

This is rather ironic. You just argued how vitally important efficiency was the production of biofuels but when it comes to efficiency of vehicles
inefficiency is a 'real constraint'. The US uses 9 million barrels of gasoline per day in passenger cars and trucks that get 20 miles per gallon on average. With plug-in hybrid cars you can get 80 miles per gallon and our constraint drops to 2.25 million barrels per day. Car sharing could raise the number of passengers per trip from 1.5 to 4.5
and save 3 million barrels per day(we'd need a lot fewer cars). Is it a 'real constraint' that we must drive everywhere alone?
Would ridesharing really collapse the economy?

Windpowered trains? Bicycles?

Now you're being just an ornery mean ol' black-hearted oilman, laughing at all us nice TODers.

Majorian, the key concept here is Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI). When you are producing corn ethanol, the Energy Return is not much greater than the Energy Invested. The article says 25% more, but I think that's being optimistic. Other sources claim you actually suffer a bit of loss on the end-to-end process. Realistically, producing corn ethanol is not much better than a very expensive way to convert natural gas and diesel fuel into automobile fuel.

The reason the US government is pushing ethanol is pressure from the corn farming lobby. The subsidies they give to the farmers to produce corn has caused them to grow so much corn they can't sell it all. So, they are pushing ethanol as a subsidized method of disposing of the surplus corn produced by the growing subsidies.

The oil companies don't mind this because 1) The taxpayers are paying for it, not them, and 2) ethanol is an octane enhancer, and all their other octane enhancers are being banned due to toxicity. Ethanol is not likely to be banned.

Biodiesel has a much better energy return on energy invested - the article estimates it at 93%. That's still not very good, but it's better than ethanol.

The limiting factor on biofuels is that the US does not have nearly enough farmland to provide all the fuel it consumes. Not even close. The US government is trying to obscure that little fact, and also the fact that producing biofuels cuts food exports to developing countries and forces food prices up - which means that people in poor countries will go hungry so US drivers can continue to drive to work.

The gasoline cut of crude oil is not the full picture, because a refinery produces a lot more products than gasoline (although gasoline is the most profitable.) In fact, a refinery produces more in products than it consumes in crude oil. (I could go into the details of why, but that's getting off topic.) You have to take in to account all of the products to get an energy balance. The energy return on crude oil is about 600% or so, which is playing in a whole different ballpark than ethanol.

BTW,diesel bus engines in Sweden can run on ethanol as well as biodiesel so those farmers can use their moonshine in their tractors.

Yes, but is it cost effective? It's probably subsidized even more than in the US. In contrast, when I worked in the oil industry, we used to run all the field vehicles and stationary equipment on natural gas. We got NG as a byproduct of oil production, we had lots of compressors, and we had a bunch of guys who could weld up anything we needed. It was extremely cost effective because we got the NG more or less for free. You can also run buses and tractors on natural gas, but your average farmer is not up to fabricating the equipment himself, and doesn't get NG for free assuming he can get it at all.

Windpowered trains? Bicycles?

Now you're being just an ornery mean ol' black-hearted oilman, laughing at all us nice TODers.

Majorian, you seem to think I'm kidding. In fact a lot of us black-hearted oilmen used to ride the wind-powered train and bicycles to work - and drive natural gas fueled vehicles in the field.

Do you know why? It's because every gallon of gas we saved was a gallon we could sell to you at a profit, and for us employees and consultants, a lot of that money ended up in our own personal pockets. We spent some of it on train tickets and bicycles, and used the rest to pay off our mortgages and top up our retirement plans.

The oil companies are in the business of selling gasoline at a profit, not using it themselves. They don't get paid anything for burning their own gasoline, so they try to use less. However, they would encourage you to use more.

Biodiesel has a much better energy return on energy invested - the article estimates it at 93%. That's still not very good, but it's better than ethanol.

I tried to do an analysis and you're back to quoting the nonsense of figuring out the BTUs in animal feed.
And like all oil men you suspect that the EROI of ethanol is less than 1
despite a whole industry operating for 30 years.
IMO, EROI was dreamed up by oil execs to boost their energy cocaine.

The oil companies are in the business of selling gasoline at a profit, not using it themselves. They don't get paid anything for burning their own gasoline, so they try to use less. However, they would encourage you to use more.

like all oil men you suspect that the EROI of ethanol is less than 1 despite a whole industry operating for 30 years.

It's not just oil men. Anybody who knows much about American agriculture has doubts about it. It is very, very energy intensive and heavily subsidized. I grew up on a farm, by the way, so I have a pretty good idea how it works.

If you want a good read on the subject, try "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan. Be prepared for him to upset many of your assumptions about American agriculture.

If the US wanted a good source of cheap ethanol, it would import sugar cane ethanol from Brazil, because the Brazilians can produce it with cheaper labor and fewer energy inputs. However, the real goal of the fuel ethanol program is is to subsidize American farmers, not to solve the American energy problem, so Brazilian cane ethanol imports are prohibited.

Probably the viewpoint of the tobacco company execs.

Now, that's a really smelly red herring, or a straw man if you prefer, and has nothing to do with the topic. It is an interesting one, however, because the tobacco company execs weren't that smart and many of them died of tobacco-related diseases.

However, to get back to the topic, I think that the recent expansion of the fuel ethanol industry in the US has effectively demonstrated that it isn't a viable solution to the US's energy problems. Many people thought it was, but putting it into large-scale production has exposed its many flaws.

My own personal solution was wind-powered electric trains, bicycles, and walking. It worked for me, I used them for many years, but apparently you have a problem with it.

My own personal solution was wind-powered electric trains, bicycles, and walking. It worked for me, I used them for many years, but apparently you have a problem with it.

I would have to agree with you on those points - discussion of alt. energy is too often tainted by the "but however will we fuel our cars!?" line. The answer is that we won't. I still believe (maybe I'm deluded or in the 'bargaining' stage) that we are not necessarily facing the apocalypse.

However, it is also worth asking "how much of that biofuel depends on unsustainable aquifer drawdown?" and "how much of the remaining biofuel depends on water supplies that will be vanishing from climate change?" and "how are we going to feel burning food (even if it is produced in North America and not imported) when parts of the world that will be suffering far more than North America will are experiencing dieoff?

India is largely dependent on glacier runoff for its water. Unlike the USA, they do not use a tremendous amount of food to raise livestock or to make ethanol. Gwynne Dyer, in his book Climate Wars, calls this our "not-so-secret escape hatch" for when energy depletion and climate change begin to seriously stress agriculture in North America. In India and the middle east, they will have very serious problems compared to North America. Gwynne Dyer predicts that nuclear war will break out here, when huge populations in starving, dry countries go to war before they starve, just like people always do.

I think it is fairly clear that The American Dream is over, and good riddance. Just imagine if it had continued - by the time I'm 30, I would be moved out, married, living in a 10,000 square foot house, I would drive a light armored vehicle to work, play video games on my 12' TV, eat farmed carnivore instead of farmed herbivore for dinner, then probably cap the evening off by taking a spin around the province in my personal helicopter. By the time my son is 30, he would have a 20,000 square foot house, his TV would take up an entire wall and multiple stories (in fact, it would most likely be a structural member in the house), he would probably fly an automated helicopter with a hottub in it to work. This sounds ridiculous - but it is a logical extension of what the high priests of BAU tell us. (It would also be fair trade, organic and run on hydrogen). (See the Great Gatsby for a better expression of this idea, except the American Dream wasn't over back then).

I would say that any mode of living where you have community, family and friends and a standard of living such that you are likely to grow old is probably as good as any other.

However, it is also worth asking "how much of that biofuel depends on unsustainable aquifer drawdown?" and "how much of the remaining biofuel depends on water supplies that will be vanishing from climate change?"

Those are a couple of other very good questions. A lot of US farmland is semi-arid and water constrained. If you are going to increase your agricultural production, you need to irrigate it. The supply of water west of the 100th meridian is already severely overcommitted and this is only going to get worse in the future.

India is largely dependent on glacier runoff for its water.

Actually, glaciers don't create water, they only store it for summer use, so I don't think that is a big problem. India gets most of its rainfall as a result of the monsoons, and they are not going to stop because of climate change, so I think they can continue to produce food. The problem is population growth rate, and I think they are starting to get a handle on that.

The way things are going, India will probably be able to export enough goods and services to import enough food from the West, IF the west does not turn all its surplus food into automobile fuel. An interesting development is Americans flying to India to have their heart bypasses. India is a place where you can find very good medical people who work very cheap (particularly support people.) And Americans need a lot of heart bypasses as a result of their sedentary lifestyles. A heart bypass will pay for an awful lot of food.

The real problem is Pakistan and the Middle East, which already have gone as far as they can with irrigation, and have ridiculously high birth rates (the average Pakistani woman has 8 kids!) That's where the dieoff will occur. India has nuclear weapons, Pakistan has nuclear weapons, Israel has nuclear weapons, Iran is working on them, and several other Mid East countries are getting there, so I think they're getting ready for the big nuke-off. It's a messy method of population reduction.

Anybody who knows much about American agriculture has doubts about it. It is very, very energy intensive and heavily subsidized. I grew up on a farm, by the way, so I have a pretty good idea how it works.

The ethanol blender's credit which pays the oil companies to put ethanol in gasoline has recently 2008 been reduced from 51 to 45 cents per gallon. The oil industry receives subsidies worth about 12 cents per gallon The other subsidies are the usual subsidies for foodstuffs, timber and horseracing. The question then is whether a 33 cent per gallon net subsidy for an ethanol industry is worth it. We already need ethanol for RFG so the question is moot.

Of course the ethanol industry is even more intense - around 4 times the energy intensity of the petroleum industry per gallon of product. That's the problem when you have to apply all of that fertilizer, and then use all of that natural gas to get the water out of your product.

Plus, some of those subsidies were things like money devoted to carbon sequestration research, some went to a program for low income housing energy assistance, and some was for coal. All lumped in as a Big Oil subsidy, and all together amounting to less than half of what you asserted.

Further, given that the ethanol industry uses petroleum inputs, they are then doubly-subsidized on those inputs, eh? The petroleum that went into the ethanol got a subsidy, and then the ethanol got a subsidy.

When you are just differentiating between two types of auto/truck fuel that nickel a gallon may be correct, but when you add in all the public funding of the road system needed to run the auto/truck system it would seem a much higher per gallon subsidy # will show up. Of course the oil industry isn't the only benefactor of that public road system subsidy, and there would seem few incentives for new owners of GM to cut the road system subsidy the auto/truck industry seems to need for survival, except for one, the survival of the nation itself. As ALAN might say

Best hopes for the smartest rail mile to road mile mix we can muster in the shortest time frame we can put it together ?- )

I got that 12 cents from an anti-ethanol web site run by GSW Strategy Group.

So you found a number you liked and you ran with it? Any attempt to validate the number? Any breakdown of the number? Do you even understand how that number was derived? I doubt it. Read the essay in which he derived that number, and you will see that he isn't saying that this is the amount. He said "Based on what a member of the Obama administration said - whom I disagree with - this is the amount."

You mentioned insanity, let's look at this. If a gallon of ethanol replaced 6.34 gallons of oil fuels, then we should have backed out close to 70 billion gallons of oil fuels at this point. Have we? No, when I recently looked at it, I can't see that we have backed out any for reasons other than falling demand due to high prices. (And before you claim that demand fell because of ethanol, it is contained within the demand number):

So my conclusion is that Shapouri is wrong, or your interpretation of Shapouri is wrong.

So this raises the issue once again--is R^2 'anti-ethanol'?

In your mind, anyone who challenges the meme of "ethanol is good for America" is anti-ethanol. What I am is pro-facts. If the facts say ethanol is good, then ethanol is good. But I will have a proper accounting of the facts, not a perpetual distortion as you are prone to do.

Brazil produces about 3/4 of the US mostly for domestic market. They couldn't replace US ethanol if they tried.

Sure they could. They could just clearcut the entire Amazon Rain Forest and plant sugar cane. Of course, many people would have a problem with that solution.

The real problem is that nobody, but NOBODY, has the agricultural farmland to replace the entire US gasoline supply with ethanol. And there is also the problem that you are converting food into fuel, and many parts of the world are shorter of food than fuel.

If you don't want a lot of people to die (albeit in other countries), this needs to be managed correctly without assuming that global resources are infinite. No resources are infinite.

Sure they could. They could just clearcut the entire Amazon Rain Forest and plant sugar cane. Of course, many people would have a problem with that solution.

While I agree with the overall gist of your point, every time I hear someone say this, and I hear it a lot, it really annoys me no end! For the record sugarcane does not grow well in the Amazon region of Brazil. Sugarcane only grows well in central and southeastern Brazil. Sugarcane needs a dry season.

RMG might not be aware of dry seasons as he thinks the loss of the Himalayan glaciers won't much affect the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Yellow rivers that source in and rely on ice melt for a very substantial part of their flow during the dry season (more than half the Ganges flow comes from glacial runoff). Apparently he is aware of a model that predicts when the glaciers are gone, the monsoons will remain relatively constant and new off season rainfall will increase enough in the river basins to take up the slack the stored water (now being 'withdrawn' at an increasing rate, which is now causing some additional flooding) will no longer add to the system. This may be possible but thus far it is not what I have seen predicted (but no one is sticking their neck out too far to say exactly how it will be). About 2.4 million people live in the above mentioned drainages and over half of those people in regions heavily affected by glacial melt so what happens with no ice will be very important.

RMG is familiar with the Alps and the Andes (can't remember if he mentioned skiing the Himalayas) so he has seen glacier covered mountains but the Alps have only 2% glacial cover and the Himalayas have 17%. This difference doesn't even taken into account the ranges' relative areas or the nature of their rainfall cycles...losing the glaciers in the Himalayas would appear to be a very large regional climate event.

I have trekked the high Himalayas of Nepal and Bhutan, though I have never skied the Himalayas (although I believe my old skis have, since I donated them to a charity that gives skis and skiing lessons to villagers in the Himalayas. Amazingly, they don't know how to ski, and there's no other way to get around in winter.)

The presence or absence of the glaciers has no effect on the hydrological balance of the area. They depend on the monsoons for their water, and like most tropical regions they have a wet season and a dry season. Nothing grows in the dry season, so the farmers go and porter for the tourists, or something.

The glaciers do tend to smooth out the river flow, but realistically, everything depends on the monsoons. If the monsoons fail, so do the crops. Things grow amazingly fast during the monsoons, and not at all during the dry season.

The real problem is overpopulation. As a pointed out to my wife, farmers don't terrace mountainsides because they enjoy the mountain air, or because the soil is better at high altitude, they do so because there is no flat land left in the valleys. It's an extremely arduous and difficult way of life that produces little in the way of food, and is not something you would do if you had an alternative.

The population of Nepal is almost 30 million people now, and growing fast. The birth rate is much too high and they already have far too many people in an area with far too little flat land. It's a completely unsustainable system and things are deteriorating rapidly. If you want to go there, go now before things fall apart completely. Be prepared to see a lot of desperate people.

They do have enormous hydroelectric potential, but they don't know to develop it. I visited the second biggest hydroelectric plant in the country, and it was smaller than the cozy little hydro plant up the mountainside from me in this small Canadian town I live in.

China is right next door, and the Chinese do know how to develop the hydro potential. They clearly have their eyes on it. I went to a small town 50 km from the Chinese border, and what did I find? The Chinese had bought the biggest hotel in town, turned it into a construction office, and were building a first-class highway into Nepal from Tibet. Free of charge to the Nepalese people, of course.

I mentioned to the guide that this road was built to carry tanks, and he said, "Yes, that's why I'm learning Chinese." From his perspective, a Chinese invasion would be better than the current situation. The Chinese may be ruthless, but they do know how to run things.

No arguement on the population issue from me. But the smoothing effect of glaciers is substantial, even in the underground part of the hydrological cycle. If almost all the water dumped per year runs out quickly (assuming what falls now as high snow and is stored multiple years enventually getting released in the dry season runs out right away) the ground water will start to seep into the much emptier on average drainages at a quicker clip. Then the dryer ground with less vegetation cover will shed what water actually falls on it faster thus exacerbating the situation. Remember the Ganges gets over half its flow from glacial runoff, that is a lot of smoothing.

Of course some sort of dam system could be put in place to try and duplicate or even improve on the storage mechanism of the glaciers, but like you say it is rough country, full of desperately poor people, not likely a good system (and our history of designing dam systems is full of unintended results that have had many of what were once called good systems reassessed) will be put in place in 25-30 years. Still it theoretically could be done and if enough wetland flitration was built into could be very beneficial, but we don't even do that in the rich west.

The Chinese are not noted for enlightenned whole ecosystem dam system designs either. With the glaciers gone the silt problem at some of the big Chinese dams may be stabilized, but quite a few of the reservoirs will be pretty well filled in by then.

Then when you are talking an area as extensive as the Himalayan ice fields being ice free, thus warmer and reflecting less sunlight and becoming warmer yet, what that will do to the monsoon circulation cycle is likely not calculable with an great degree of accuracy. That kind of population density getting major shifts in the cycle of yearly water flow looks like prime major conflict seed to me. The dams being built now are hardly smoothing out regional feelings.

Curious? Just what percentage of the people in drainages affected by the smoothing effects of the glaciers get work as porters during the dry season ?- ) I'd bet most of them have never seen the mountains up close, we are talking near 1.4 billion people here. And like you said first off, that is the problem.

Nepal does look to be on a fast freight to disaster even from a distance, up close it must be truly disconcerting. I've seen poor enough people in Central America, if I need refresher I guess Haiti would be a good destination. I will leave sky high Nepal to those with better sinuses.

Time to rewax and try and skate on 0 to -10 F snow. This white desert is hardly a sinus paradise. Good skiing and easy on the knees though.

There's not much vegetation cover near the glaciers - they kill most of the vegetation - so there's little water storage there. Their primary effect is to shift the runoff from spring (snow melt) to summer (ice melt). But the hydrological balance over the year is approximately the same whether you have a glacier or not - snow and rain fall = runoff.

People would normally put dams on the rivers, anyway, because of their enormous hydroelectric potential. They just do not have the money and are not sufficiently organized to do so. Once you have a dam, you have water storage. From that point forward, river flow depends on electricity demand.

The glaciers themselves are dangerous. I visited one valley where an ice dam had broken upstream and dumped a glacial lake into the valley, killing many of the inhabitants. The Himalayas are a place where nature can easily kill you, whether by an ice dam breaking, avalanches, landslides, earthquakes or other causes. High altitude combat is another killer, because countries insist on fighting over glaciated territory that is not really capable of growing anything.

If the temperature increases, it is unlikely to reduce rainfall in the area. During the Holocene Climactic Optimum, 9,000 to 5,000 years ago when it was significantly warmer than today, current desert regions of Central Asia were extensively forested due to higher rainfall.

The glaciers near here where I live in the Canadian Rocky Mountains probably disappeared completely during that period - and reformed when the climate cooled again.

"only 12% of gasoline demand" How does this mesh with the US gov. current attempt to increase the ethanol content in petrol to 12% (link). Where does the extra ethanol come from, as i don't think that all the corn currently in production is earmarked for biofuels?

By law now corn ethanol can only provide 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol.
USDA says the US can sustainably harvest 1 billion tons of cellulose from agriculture (998 million tons) per year and still export food.
1 billion tons per year x 60 gallons per ton = 60 billion gallons per year.

Written by andrew:
How does this mesh with the US gov. current attempt to increase the ethanol content in petrol to 12%. Where does the extra ethanol come from...?

If U.S. demand for gasoline continues to decrease, it many not need to come from anywhere. Increasing the blending ratio slightly could allow the total annual ethanol production to remain constant. Your source states there is a mandated limit of ~360 Mb / yr (presumably) for production of ethanol from corn. In 2008 U.S. demand for ethanol was about 230 Mb. According to incomplete data for 2009 demand for ethanol has increased ~16% to ~270 Mb. Because the demand for gasoline has decreased, the ethanol blending ratio is approaching 10% before the ~360 Mb limit is reached. The corn ethanol lobby probably wants to keep demand for their product strong all the way to 360 Mb / yr.

Rapesed is the prefered crop for Bio Diesel In most of Europe due to better Yeilds no expensive ditilation either . But it does require approx 20% methanol for Transesterification and you are left with slightly less amount Glycerin to dispose off.
Ascending order
Crop litres oil/ha US gal/acre
soybean 446 48
rapeseed 1190 127
castor bean 1413 151 canola
oil palm 5950 635

Thermodynamically, it would make more sense to hydrogenate the vegetable oil to long-chain hydrocarbons + propane instead of trans-esterifying to methyl esters + glycerol. Both the "green diesel" and propane are suitable for motor fuel.

If ethanol is indeed going to remain an important component of our transportation liquid fuel supply, and given the inherent vagaries of agricultural yields and the growing stress on global food supply, should we not be thinking about establishing some sort of a strategic ethanol reserve?

I am fully aware of the storage problems associated with ethanol and the absolute necessity of having it not come in contact with moisture. Therefore, I tend to think that underground storage of ethanol might not be practicable. Which leaves large tank farms as the means of storage. It would probably be best to locate these at strategic supply nodes rather than as one giant facility. I could picture a storage capacity of say one or two months ethanol supply based on the difference between average corn yield and realistic worst-case corn yield.

(I don't know if it would be cheaper and/or more workable to just create a dedicated ethanol-focused strategic corn reserve that could be drawn down by ethanol produces in times of tight corn supply. However, doing so might create havoc with the corn futures market. Any of you ag people out there care to comment?)

As US corporations are extremely loathe to expend capital on anything that doesn't generate a high immediate return, such an undertaking would have to be governmental. However, I would not hold my breath that such would ever be built, but I think it is important to recognize that increased dependence on ethanol makes us vulnerable in ways that are different from oil dependency.

Coskata claims they have bugs that can turn carbon monoxide syngas into ethanol at 100 gallons per ton of woodchips. With woodchips you get 'green' ethanol but you can make syngas from coal also(dirty).

Maybe a billion tons of coal could create 100 billion gallons of FF ethanol as a dirty reserve. CTL makes about 90 gallons of gasoline per ton of coal.

There are ways to produce EtOH that do not involve using coal or natural gas for the heat needed to distill EtOH from water as well as to make DDG/DDGS from the leftovers of fermenting crops like corn. Electricity is easily made from wind turbines in the US; no need for coal to do that. And the NH3 used by corn and other crops to synthesize protein does not have to come from natural gas or coal - electricity and water can provide the H2, and there is no shortage of N2 in the atmosphere. This could raise the cost of production by 10% to 50%, depending on which route is chosen.

But, these capital investments make EtOH more expensive to manufacture. If oil products were priced like they were in Europe (at $5 to $7/gallon of gasoline) via appropriate taxes, and both coal and natural gas were priced via taxes to discourage frivolous use, the US would have a bigger EtOH and biodiesel industry, one profitable without so many subsidies. Right now, EtOH is going for about $2.10/gallon; at $4/gallon, a lot more renewable energy (electricity, biomass) and/or capital improvements would be economically viable. And we would not be consuming as much methane as we now are.

Anyway, my question's are why aren't sales taxes on bulk petroleum imports being pursued? This would discourage oil product consumption, and make domestic biofuels more profitable, thus boosting the farm economy at the same time. The same would apply to NH3 imports, or the CO2 pollution that results from the use of fossil fuels to make the H2 to make NH3. And why aren't taxes imposed on biofuels producers based on the amount of non-renewable energy used to make these biofuels? And what about encouraging the use of waste heat and "renewable CO2" coming from EtOH facilities (corn, sugar beets, cellulosic via fermentation or syngas) to grow value added crops that require warmth, like the "salad bowl" portion of the diet". This would result in a lot less oil usage for trucking vegies across the country, and result in more employment at EtOH facilities (could quadruple employment at an EtOH facility via the greenhouses). Taxing waste heat dumped into our environment might make it more inviting to use it or else you'd pay for being wasteful.

Biofuels, like any liquid fuels, are a premium liquid fuel very useful to transportation, construction and farming. They have uses that are often difficult or impossible to do with electricity (like driving long distances in cold weather), or powering up ships/boats, and aircraft. So be it - you can't use electricity for every thing, though electric cars in urban warm areas for short haul runs are a great idea. As are electric trains - freight and passenger. Anyway, some liquid fuels will always be needed. But we certainly don't "need" 9 million bbls/day of gasoline if we travel half of the vehicle miles as we presently do, using cars that get at least the mileage of a Harley Davidson (60 mpg vs the present case of 22 mpg).

Of course I received the Reischauer 'smile' when I posed the following to your DOE... as such, I'm hoping your man harkens from industry or academia.

1) If organic corn crop yields have proven to be equal those of conventional corn over a 22-year period – as demonstrated by Pimentel et al. (Bioscience, July (Vol. 55:7) – with no pesticide usage; less water usage/contamination/runoff; no NatGas fertilizer usage; and a resulting EROEI increase of 30% obtained... WHY is American ETOH not mandated to be produced from organic feedstocks?

2) 10 billion gallons of corn ethanol will be produced this year in America – a record. Despite this, US corn/bushel prices remain relatively unchanged since 2007; while the UN FAOs’ 2009 food price index is trending well below 2007 and 2008 averages. Oil/barrel prices, on the other hand, are roughly half their all-time values observed in 2008. In light of these observations... WHAT are your thoughts on the impact that US corn-ethanol had, and continues to have, on food prices vs. that of petroleum? MOREOVER, is it fair to say that the food vs. fuel debate was at best hyperbole? At worst, deliberate public manipulation?

3) If US dependency on imported oil is of preeminent strategic concern... WHY is the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (the agency tasked with mitigation oversight re: petroleum input reduction strategies) allocated such a pitiful annual operations budget – equivalent to 1-day’s worth of materiel deployment in the Middle East theatre?

Farmers do not grow feed corn and sell it directly to a distiller. They sell to a middle man who mixes the corn from one farmer with that from many other farmers. I walk past one of those middle man operations every day on my way to and from the post office. Some days trucks unload corn and some days they fill up with corn. Separating organic corn from conventional corn is not practical. The middle man sells the feed corn to meat producers as well as to distillers.

The idea of fueling the ethanol production chain with the ethanol produced are experiments which universities could do if the industry would ante up the grant money for the experiments. I would like to see these experiments done instead of all those debatable meta-analyses out there. Both promoters and detractors need to put up or shut up.

The size of the ethanol subsidy seems out of line when compared to government subsidies on other energy sources. The issue is even more clouded by the need to compare the ethanol to emission-free energy sources. Electric power produced by renewables is subsidized at more than $20/megawatt. Nuclear is subsidized at less than $2/megawatt. Generation IV reactors that operate at high temperatures can thermo-chemically produce hydrogen from water at 50+% efficiency. The creation hydrocarbon synfuels from CO2 and H2 might be economically competitive, especially if the external costs are associated with ethanol are factor in? Of course the technology which I propose is not yet fully available so it may be premature to ask the question; However before WWII all hydrogen for ammonia synthesis was produced from water by hydrolysis. Today the Haber process gets the hydrogen from natural gas. The potential is there to create ammonia and hydrocarbons with nuclear heat. We should not be ignored nuclear energy when planning for future liquid fuel sources. Nuclear has often been left out of the equation. I have no tie to nuclear energy, but as a corn farm owner, I benefit greatly from the ethanol subsidy. My feeling about government farm subsidies is that they should be used only as a floor to keep a farmer from bankruptcy in truly adverse situations. We should strive to avoid continuing subsidies where long term survival of the product is not possible without the subsidy.

Any biofuel that needs fossil inputs (petro diesel, NG urea), subsidy equivalents (PTC, blending quotas) and off-farm nutrients (NPK) is ultimately doomed. The Peak Oil downslope and cash strapped governments mean that biofuels will have to be self reliant. That means the fuel will also have to run the farm machinery and that mineral nutrients are returned to the soil. I don't see ethanol achieving that. That is, ethanol powering the trucks and tractors, the end of the PTC and composted corn mash trucked back to the fields as fertiliser. If they are lucky the city commuter ends up with what little ethanol is left over, if any.

If grain ethanol is not the answer I'm not sure what is. I suspect that hydrogenated synfuels could be sustainable albeit expensive. Organic carbon is combined with renewable or nuclear hydrogen to make methane, methanol or dimethyl ether. The combustion products are looped within biosphere while phosphorus, potassium etc stay local. However I have no idea whether this approach is remotely affordable. The fuel cost may cripple the economy but that's going to happen anyway.

If one uses the search function up in the corner and types in Rapier and ethanol, the result will be page after page of anti ethanol posts by RR. Long time readers of TOD know RR's position on ethanol and it is not pro ethanol. Perhaps he has changed his mind.

Ethanol supporters like myself welcome new converts even if they are only tippy toeing toward ethanol. And to have a major opponent of ethanol become an ethanol agnostic is fantastic.

I have to add that I agree with RR on using natural gas to mitigate Peak Oil. But the problems natural gas faces are similar to ethanol only worse. It is not compatible with the current infrastructure of vehicles nor the distribution system.

Converting gasoline vehicles to natural gas is even more formidable, expensive and unlikely than getting flex fuel vehicles on the road. And gasoline can not be blended with natural gas like ethanol. If by some miracle natural gas were to play a bigger transport role, many oil refiners and distributors would be put out of business so they will fight it.

A question I often ask is: Were we to get the best and brightest scientists, experts, and thinkers of our day together and ask them to develop strategies for transitioning our soceity from fossil fuels to renewable fuels do you think corn based ethanol would have even been written down on the brainstorming list?

A good question to ask is how is ethanol production like the Vietnam War?

I remember that one. Everybody was a Monday- morning quarterback. "Drop more bombs on North Vietnam!" "No more bombs on Vietnam!" "Invade the North." "Add another ten divisions in South Vietnam!" "Remove the troops now!" "Give more support to the Diem/Theiu/Ky/Palooka regimes!" "Launch an atomic attack on China/USSR/North Korea/the Jews/Santa Claus!" In the background was all the noise. It was ridiculous. meanwhile, the policy morons did what they were always going to do, accept dirty money that changed hands under the table and press the war effort as ineffectively as possible.

Reality - in the form of a dozen North Vietnamese armored divisions - ended the idiocy. That's what reality does. People had to learn perspective and the moral balance of ends and means. Morality is not sentiment or superstition, it represents a balance; a form of integrity. It is an alignment of public purpose and public means. The purpose of the war had to find a balancing dynamic, that the benefits of the likely outcome would merit the expenditure of blood and treasure. In Vietnam, all possible outcomes led to dictatorship, either a version of the long- running South Viet dictatorship or a unified form emerging from the North. The war could change nothing, only waste time and resources. It never should have been prosecuted, that was the first and fatal error. Continuing only amplified that first error.

Here, the outcome is a supported -desperately propped up - car economy. It clearly isn't enough that the world's petroleum resources have disappeared up the collective tailpipe, that was the first error. Now, agricultural resources and water must go next. When does it stop? When chickens and puppies ... and little children get ground up and cooked to make 'meat- diesel'?

Nobody is going to make policy here on The Oil Drum. Big companies like Monsanto and Cargill have paid their boys in Washington to do as they are told. Down stream are the bought off harridans and ethanol pimps. Since ethanol is a magic word that means free money, the right people will drop that word wherever possible ... along with 'energy independence' and 'green alternative' ... in K Street offices and the Rayburn building and in sub- basements under the Executive Office Building. Congressmen and administration officials will in turn drop their trousers and spread 'em, as they feel the need to 'respond effectively to constituents'.

It doesn't matter if ethanol has an energy return of minus fifty, it will be promoted. Since ethanol from straw or ground up newspapers or used cat litter promises to produce 'Umteen quadrillion mega- kilo joules' of power, it will be fully funded. Even if it's completely irrelevant to anything or likely a hoax.

The American government has become a racket that would impress Al Capone. Everywhere there are small vices and large, small corruptions and large, small robberies and gigantic; the greatest is the Fed's money laundering machine and the next is the Defense Department's various wars and the next is the blatant giveaways to insiders and well- connected, lubricated with payments to and from ex- officials and ex- Congressmen. America runs on energy and dirty money.

From this standpoint, ethanol is another scam. The burden of proof of it being otherwise lies on the participants; scams are running thick and fast on the ground in post- modern America and ethanol appears to be another version of a perpetual motion machine.

Meanwhile, reality is inexorably removing the automobile option, along with the airplane option and the helicopter option ... the shopping mall option, the highway and bridge option, the sprawling suburb option and the other machine options. The more consumption, the more 'growth', the more machines making machines and drilling more and deeper and more efficiently to gain energy faster ... simply makes reality's hammer blow that much more devastating. Instead of simply running out, it's running out faster. We are more efficiently racing to the depletion endgame.

The entire nebula of corn and subsidies and distilleries and subsides and transports and subsidies and auto- conversions and subsidies ... complexity intensifies and begins to feed on itself! At the end of the day, with water depletion, soil depletion, diminished air quality, more fossil fuel consumed to support the ethanol platform what is left? A welfare program with its 'Ethanol Queens' on one hand with another dust bowl on the other. The cars get fed, while people starve.

I don't care! I'm old, I don't have children. The world can go to hell ... because of untrammeled greed and idiocy ... so be it.

My takeaway from the Vietnam experience was, "never again!". I figured that people learned something. I was wrong, the approach is "Over and over and over again ... " because nobody learns anything.

The question I would ask is precisely what the first poster WNC askes. No farmer HAS to grow corn for ethanol. Especially when cane is the preferred product. What would YOU rather have, a tanker full of ethanol or biodiesel??? Its been said that love makes the world go round. I wish that were true, but in fact, diesels make the world go round. Sadly, most of the huge ones that run mostly ships burn #6 bunker fuel that can be 3%? sulpher??? They COULD burn a MUCH cleaner grade of fuel. ULSD #2 is no more than .0015% for comparison.

Then theres the empty backhauls. Everybody loses money on those.

Ethanol will NEVER be anything more than a low percentage octane and emission additive.

Then, even with Scanias ethanol-burning diesel-engined buses burning 65% more fuel, where is the advantage? Even polls (worthless when creating long-term policy)), actuarial tables, whatever, show ethanol to require more inputs of fertilizer and fuel and then, ultimately, lower BTUs delivered to the job.

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